Torment: Tides of Numenera

14 of 15 markets; the rest we haven't asked for this title, not markets where it is unavailable.

14 on sale1 answered “not sold”0 we did not ask

The 1 “not sold” market is read from the Steam price pass of Sep 11: that day the store answered for this game elsewhere and gave no price there. The 14 priced markets are the same rows as the table above — each the latest price we hold, dated here when it is older than that pass. The 0 marked “not asked” were not put to this store at all — either it has no storefront there or we do not collect it yet, and neither is a statement about the game. A refusal is a refusal on one day; a store can list a title again tomorrow.

Matched by title — a reused name can pair the wrong games. * is a critic aggregate. Prices and positions are each store's United States storefront; Epic charts worldwide. Audience and Score too, except Steam's, which is worldwide.

Hours played at review time, across 815 reviews with recorded playtime.

positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up

Excellent narrative play, maybe not game enough for Infinity Engine fans looking for action. Approaching the product as a highly variant hypertextual novel is the way to go, it only gets gamey after midpoint and you get to do some combat once you're basically godlike, so it doesn't feel all too bad. That's if you play it with a walkthrough, which I'd recommend for people who just want get to know the Changing God's story - it's very curious. I missed 7 XP due to bugs/dialogues not triggering as expected, but that's not too much - still managed to get 2 levels above the "reached top level" achievement. Pathfinding is good across the map, but it kinda sucks when you need precision(the collision and active area of objects can clash and characters get in the way of interactibles - too often). There's something like 5 mandatory "Crisis" situations - at least one of them is not even any combat - and in this number it's decent; would suck to have more than that in your game, no doubt. Exploration is.... decent, I'd say. Once you run through the maps in the hubs, it all becomes quite clear and POIs are memorable, at least to me. Descriptions can be re-read and you get a feel for the playstyle - imagine 10 options, 5 are asking various questions, 1 is 'farewell', 4 are actions. Pick the deepest question to get blue tide, pick a heroic action for gold tide, steer the convo to your ends with no consideration for the character - that's silver tide, etc.etc. pretty neat beginning to the Disposition system found in Pillars of Eternity. The elephant in the room is intelligibility. The game doesn't care too much about your comfort engaging its ideas, and I greatly enjoy that aspect. It was a truly alien setting to me, having no Numenera reading done beforehand; just like the Castoff finding out their legacy, I willed myself through the initial difficulties, and the game successfully conveyed to me the increasing power as I gather memories. The player then figured out what is going on quite fully by 2/3 mark. The rest was confirmation or denial of what I expected, and some of the conclusions were not stated by the Authors but actually emergent from my gameplay and that was very nice. There are some flaws in the writing, the antagonist is a bit annoyingly dumb at times. There IS an explanation for his silliness if you go deep enough and it's most satisfying if you can : ) Not all of the issues are explained by anything other than a writing mistake or preference, and it's fine by me - there being THIS MUCH written for the game, one out of a hundred is not bad.